Dialectics as an Essential Study

Motion has many forms. Two of them are obvious to ordinary people.

There are others which may be left to wiser persons.

These two are the study of motions from sight and sound*. The eyes are designed to look up at the stars, just as the ears are designed to hear harmonious motions.

These are sister sciences, as the Pythagoreans say.

This second study of harmonics, or the science of harmony, is a laborious study and this is why we should learn it. It will tell us whether there are any other applications of these sciences. At the same time, we must not lose sight of our own higher object.

There is a perfection:

• which all knowledge should reach, and
• which our pupils should also attain and not fall short of.

The same thing happens in the science of harmony. The teachers of harmony compare the sounds and consonances which are heard only. Their labour, like that of the astronomers, is in vain.

Those gentlemen tease and torture the strings and rack them on the pegs of the instrument. But they are not the men that I am referring to. I am referring to the Pythagoreans who have enquired about harmony. They are wrong as the astronomers.

They investigate the numbers of the harmonies which are heard. But they never apply them to problems. They never reach the natural harmonies of number, or reflect why some numbers are harmonious and others not.

But it is useful if sought with a view to the beautiful and good. But it is useless if pursued in any other spirit. Their pursuit will be valuable for our objects if all these studies reach the point of inter-communion and connection with one another and become considered in their mutual affinities*.

Until then, there is no profit in pursuing them.

Do you not know that all this is but the prelude to the actual strain that we have to learn?

Surely the skilled mathematician is not a dialectician.

Men who are unable to give and take a reason will not have the knowledge which we require of them. Dialectic is that strain which is of the intellect only.

Nevertheless, it is imitated by the sight [observable empirical data].

The sight sees things through the light of the sun. A person will find himself at the end of the intellectual world when he:

• tries to discover the absolute by the light of reason only, without the help of the senses, and
• perseveres by pure intelligence until perceives the absolute good.

This is the same as the sight that has seen the visible.

This progress is called dialectic.

Dialectic grants the power of elevating the highest principle in the soul to contemplate the best in existence.

The raising of this faculty serves as the light which provides sight. This power is akin to:

• the release of the prisoners from chains
• their translation from the shadows to the images and to the light, and
• the ascent from the underground den to the sun.

The power of dialectic alone can reveal reality to a disciple of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. There is no other method of comprehending all true existence or revealing the nature of each thing through a regular process. The arts in general:

• are concerned with the desires or opinions of men
• are cultivated for production and construction, or the preservation of such productions.

Math and geometry only dream about being. They never can behold the waking reality so long as they leave the hypotheses which they use unexamined, and are unable to give an account of them.

A man cannot imagine that such a convention can ever become science:

• if he does not know his own first principle, and
• if the conclusion and intermediate steps are also constructed out of something that he does not know.

Then dialectic, and dialectic alone, goes directly to the first principle.

It is the only science which does away with hypotheses in order to make her ground secure. By her gentle aid, she lifts up the eye of the soul which is literally buried in an outlandish slough. She uses the sciences as handmaids and helpers in the work of conversion.

Custom calls them sciences. But they should have some other name implying more clarity than opinion and less clarity than science. We called this understanding*.

But why should we dispute about names when we have realities of such importance to consider?

We have 4 divisions of knowledge:

1. Knowledge from the intellect – this is concerned with being:

• Science [Physics]
• Understanding [Superphysics]

2. Knowledge from opinion – this is concerned with becoming:

• Belief [Metaphysics] – this is the counterpart of science
• Perception of Shadows [Data science] – this is the counterpart of understanding

But let us defer the correlation and subdivision of opinion and intellect, for it will be a long enquiry. The dialectician is someone who attains a conception of the essence of each thing. A person who fails to see the essence of a thing also fails in intelligence. The same is true for the conception of the good.

A man does not know the idea of good unless:

• he is able to abstract and define rationally the idea of good, and
• he can run through all objections and disprove them through absolute truth, never faltering.

If he cannot do this, then he:

• understands only a shadow given by opinion and not by science, and
• dreams and slumbers in this life.

We do not want the children of our ideal State or its future rulers to be like posts having no reason in them and yet have authority over the highest matters. You will make a law that they will be educated in the greatest skill in asking and answering questions.

Dialectic, then is the coping-stone of the sciences.

It is set over them. No other science can be placed higher. The nature of knowledge can go no further.

But to whom are we to assign these studies? How are they to be assigned?